No matter how good the sensors get, if they are closer to the subject you get better readings!!! You also don’t have to wait for the satellite to get there!!!
Douglas DC
May 5, 2011 8:04 pm
Had the occasion to the see a TR-2 and an SR-71 flyby at two separate airshows.
Yes the TR in full burner did climb like an Atlas. The SR-71 like nothing else before or since…
Kelly Johnson was a national treasure.
My wife when she was staying in Marysville with a friend of the family, she kept
seeing these”black birds” going in and out of Beale. “What are they called?” she asked,
her friend smiled and said:”Blackbird’…
Oh, good, I got it right. It was a U-2.
For those discussing the landing characteristics of the U-2 I offer this video. Warning, lyrics in the accompanying song are very much NSFW, albeit quite appropriate.
Joshua Corning
May 5, 2011 10:13 pm
We still use the U-2?
I always thought the Blackbrid had cooler lines….but maybe the U-2 is like a 1911 or a BIC lighter….a classic that is impossible to improve on.
KristianA
May 5, 2011 10:15 pm
Has anyone seen the huge plastic island in the Pacific on Google earth?
I was once an aircraft engineer and a flight engineer and Lockheed stuff was special in the way that it was made. Some thirty or forty years ago I was in the air and heard a may day from a U2 , his engine had flamed out near the south pole and was expecting to glide to Tasmania, that is a long way to glide. Not long after he called again and said that he could make it to the Australian mainland and land at his normal destination in Gippsland Victoria. That is a ship load far to go in a glide. Magic.
BobW
May 6, 2011 5:58 am
It’s a glider with an 8am shadow over an E-W runway in Iowa circa April 1st.
grayman
May 6, 2011 9:23 am
It is a TR1 as the U2 was retired many years ago, a beautiful site anyway. I am going to click on the anwser now.
George E. Smith
May 6, 2011 10:54 am
Doesn’t look like a U2 to me. I would venture an opinion, that a U2 has a longer wing span ratio than is in that picture.
Maybe I’ll look anyway.
George E. Smith
May 6, 2011 10:56 am
So I was right, it is just a google earth photoshopped picture of a U2 taking off, so why is the plane not over the runway, but its shadow is ?
Old PI
May 6, 2011 12:05 pm
I hate to even contemplate how many thousands of feet of film I’ve looked at taken by a U-2. Never made it to Beale, though – three tries, three trips to Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE. I was at RAF Alconbury when we had the RF-4s and the TR-1s using the same runway. Used to love to see the TR-1s take off. One of the fun things about a TR-1 (U-2, also) is that they had small wheels that were inserted into a socket on the outside edge of the wings. These would fall off during take-off.
Interesting incident: we had a TR-1 aircraft up in a training/familiarization flight. The aircraft flamed out, and the pilot (a relative newbie to the aircraft) declared an in-flight emergency – normal for most jet aircraft. For the TR-1, not so good an idea. It took him three hours to get down. Needless to say, he probably got a good $$$-chewing from his commander, the Base commander, and the fire department.
One of the things U-2s and TR-1s were used for when I was in England was to fly missions to monitor the drift of radioactive fall-out from Chernobyl. Just for grins, the U-2 was/is considered a “strategic” asset, the TR-1 a “tactical” asset. Different imaging systems, different tasking, but basically the same airframe.
Jim Masterson
May 8, 2011 4:51 am
>>
JEM says:
May 5, 2011 at 9:44 am
Best to get up and over the SFO class B as quickly as you can.
<<
Yes, but back then it was a TCA.
Jim
The U-2 may still be a viable high-altitude sensing platform,
over peaceful territory for NASA, or for the military where it controls the skies (as over Afghanistan/Pakistan).
NASA operates many old airplanes for research work, in part as fitting sensors is expensive, in part as operational reliability is less critical for them than the military or commercial operators, in part because capital cost is low.
NASA has a DC-8, and had at least one Blackbird type spy-plane they used for high-speed research.
No matter how good the sensors get, if they are closer to the subject you get better readings!!! You also don’t have to wait for the satellite to get there!!!
Had the occasion to the see a TR-2 and an SR-71 flyby at two separate airshows.
Yes the TR in full burner did climb like an Atlas. The SR-71 like nothing else before or since…
Kelly Johnson was a national treasure.
My wife when she was staying in Marysville with a friend of the family, she kept
seeing these”black birds” going in and out of Beale. “What are they called?” she asked,
her friend smiled and said:”Blackbird’…
Oh, good, I got it right. It was a U-2.
For those discussing the landing characteristics of the U-2 I offer this video. Warning, lyrics in the accompanying song are very much NSFW, albeit quite appropriate.
We still use the U-2?
I always thought the Blackbrid had cooler lines….but maybe the U-2 is like a 1911 or a BIC lighter….a classic that is impossible to improve on.
Has anyone seen the huge plastic island in the Pacific on Google earth?
I was once an aircraft engineer and a flight engineer and Lockheed stuff was special in the way that it was made. Some thirty or forty years ago I was in the air and heard a may day from a U2 , his engine had flamed out near the south pole and was expecting to glide to Tasmania, that is a long way to glide. Not long after he called again and said that he could make it to the Australian mainland and land at his normal destination in Gippsland Victoria. That is a ship load far to go in a glide. Magic.
It’s a glider with an 8am shadow over an E-W runway in Iowa circa April 1st.
It is a TR1 as the U2 was retired many years ago, a beautiful site anyway. I am going to click on the anwser now.
Doesn’t look like a U2 to me. I would venture an opinion, that a U2 has a longer wing span ratio than is in that picture.
Maybe I’ll look anyway.
So I was right, it is just a google earth photoshopped picture of a U2 taking off, so why is the plane not over the runway, but its shadow is ?
I hate to even contemplate how many thousands of feet of film I’ve looked at taken by a U-2. Never made it to Beale, though – three tries, three trips to Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE. I was at RAF Alconbury when we had the RF-4s and the TR-1s using the same runway. Used to love to see the TR-1s take off. One of the fun things about a TR-1 (U-2, also) is that they had small wheels that were inserted into a socket on the outside edge of the wings. These would fall off during take-off.
Interesting incident: we had a TR-1 aircraft up in a training/familiarization flight. The aircraft flamed out, and the pilot (a relative newbie to the aircraft) declared an in-flight emergency – normal for most jet aircraft. For the TR-1, not so good an idea. It took him three hours to get down. Needless to say, he probably got a good $$$-chewing from his commander, the Base commander, and the fire department.
One of the things U-2s and TR-1s were used for when I was in England was to fly missions to monitor the drift of radioactive fall-out from Chernobyl. Just for grins, the U-2 was/is considered a “strategic” asset, the TR-1 a “tactical” asset. Different imaging systems, different tasking, but basically the same airframe.
>>
JEM says:
May 5, 2011 at 9:44 am
Best to get up and over the SFO class B as quickly as you can.
<<
Yes, but back then it was a TCA.
Jim
The U-2 may still be a viable high-altitude sensing platform,
over peaceful territory for NASA, or for the military where it controls the skies (as over Afghanistan/Pakistan).
NASA operates many old airplanes for research work, in part as fitting sensors is expensive, in part as operational reliability is less critical for them than the military or commercial operators, in part because capital cost is low.
NASA has a DC-8, and had at least one Blackbird type spy-plane they used for high-speed research.